- If you're building a SaaS business eventually
beyond your founding team, you're going to
have to start hiring some people
in order to build, scale and grow.
In this video having built a SaaS business,
having taken it from zero to seven millionaire
on and then selling it,
having worked in multiple SaaS businesses,
I'm gonna walk you through the four hires I would make,
the first four hires I would make if I were to start with
another SaaS business today, intro
(bright electronic music)
What's up everybody?
Welcome to Unstoppable, I'm TK.
On this channel, I bring an episode every Sunday
and every Wednesday to help star founders like you
navigate the path to park market fit,
navigate the path to the next stage of growth
with an unstoppable strategy.
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Because I grew up an episode
like this every Sunday and Wednesday with the TK energy.
By the way, my SaaS school,
which helps founders like you to actually
grow their SaaS business is now open for enrollment.
So be sure to check out the link below
if you would like to work with me
to grow your SaaS business.
Okay, so you're building out your SaaS business.
Maybe you are just now starting to get to revenues,
maybe just raise that founding round
or you're starting to put together the financial
model on hiring, regardless of what stage you're in,
you're starting to think about which people,
who are the people that you would first hire
to start to get some help in growing this business.
So knowing everything that I know from my ToutApp journey,
knowing everything I know from my Marquetto journey,
both very different skill SaaS businesses,
here are the four people that I would hire.
So if you're excited to dig in,
smash that like button and let's jump right into it.
Al right, so for the four hires, right?
The way I would tether myself to deciding on this
is I would look at my core metrics
and I did an entire video on core SaaS metrics.
You can check it out here,
I'll link to it below so you can check it out
after this video.
But essentially we track the core flywheel
of every SaaS business.
You look at acquisition, activation,
revenue, retention, referral,
and over here is your ICP.
So the first hire that I would actually
make is a customer happiness person.
Now back in the ToutApp days we called them
happiness officers or was inspired by Zappos
and Tony Shay who built an entire company
based on happiness officers.
And I would hire a happiness officer
who would be responsible for making sure
that people successfully activate
once you actually bring them in.
So you are essentially making sure
that the people that are coming into
the product are successful and happy.
And I would also make sure that the happiness
officer actually ensures that they'll stick around,
they're getting the right support,
they're getting the right help,
they're getting the right resources.
And at the same time, while I would make sure
that happiness officer identifies
who are the happiest people that are sticking around
and could they refer some people?
So essentially what ends up happening
is the happiness officer, the first one that you hire
kind of picks off sort of a hybrid support,
customer success type of role.
In the early days, you can't really afford
to specialize in each of those roles.
So I generally like to do an customer happiness person.
The customer happiness person is required
to kind of split their day.
Half of their day is on proactive stuff
to help people understand
the product better, create help articles,
maybe videos, and the other half of the day
is to react to whatever the customers
and users are coming at you with to make sure
they get responsive support.
So that would be my first hire.
My first hire would be a happiness person.
The second hire I would make, the second hire absolutely
that I would make is a marketing person.
Now you may be all ready doing some of the marketing,
maybe you're in my unstoppable SaaS school program
or building out your unstoppable sales funnels,
you're doing a lot of this.
One of the first recommendations I make,
especially in the early stages,
is to actually bring on someone dedicated
to marketing and that way that person,
let's use a different color for this.
That person will solely be responsible
for this relationship.
Reaching out to your ICP,
operating that sales funnel
and making sure that you're acquiring
as many leads and users as possible.
You want someone just owning that
and operating that unstoppable sales funnel.
The other thing I would want that marketing
person to do is to find the happiest users
that you have and actually amplify their success.
So this becomes a two sided thing.
The first one is just acquiring new people out of
your ideal customer profile and if you don't know
who your ideal customer profile is,
be sure to check out this video where
where I go into details on how to actually develop
an ideal customer profile.
And at the same time while they're bringing
in new people into the ideal
customer profile from the ideal customer profile,
what they should also be doing is talking
to the existing happy customers,
capturing their results,
creating this customer stories and using
that to actually drive referrals
and also bring in more people in the ICP.
So what ends up happening is you get one person
or one or two people that are focused
on customer happiness to drive them from acquisition,
activation, revenue, retention,
to support them in that way,
to make sure that they get all the resources,
the training, the enablement,
and you've got another person that's taking
all the success stories and capturing
the biggest success stories
and the messaging around that
and amplifying it out into the market.
Those would be my first two hires
that I bring on to the team and make
them just hold them accountable to owning those two pieces.
Now before I go into number three,
let's just pause here for a second.
Now you're starting to get
the different approach to this
where you're starting to bring on this happiness person,
this marketing person, you start to tether
to the core metrics that you're tracking
in your SaaS business.
If you started to see the different approach to this,
can I just get a yes in the comments below
so I know you're with me.
Also, by the way, if you are just in
that process of building out that SaaS business,
start to scale it, be sure to download
my 10-point checklist on building
and scaling a SaaS business.
I'll link to it below and I'll tell
you more about it at the end of the video,
but the link will be below.
Now let's move on to number three.
Okay, so number one is your happiness person, right?
Number two is your marketing person.
Now the number three thing that I would
then start to focus on now regardless
of whether you're just a SMB play
or you're product-driven play
or you're an enterprise play,
the number three person I would actually go
into is actually a little bit of a trick.
It's number three and number four
I would get two salespeople.
So I wouldn't just get one,
I would definitely get two but once I've got
the marketing down because then I know enough leads
and the messaging and all that will start to come in
and I have the happiness down because
that way my SaaS business retention is most important.
So that will be taken care of.
The number three and number four roles
that I would fill our two salespeople
and the salespeople will ideally be a moderate base,
but a really, really high commission
and I would make sure that they're responsible
not just for closing deals and responding to inbound leads,
but they're also responsible for prospecting.
Hopefully by this stage you are essentially
have been like the number one AE
and you can kind of teach them a sales process
that has worked for you and on top of that,
because there's two of them,
you'll start to understand are you teaching
the sales process the wrong way?
Is this sales process different when you're not the founder
or is it the person you hired?
Because you'll have two people to compare against,
which is why I recommend two people
in that way you'll have two people focus purely
on this piece, the activation to revenue piece,
and that way you can make sure that once you get a lead
or they actually do outbound using
an unstoppable sales following,
we teach you that as well in the program,
they're able to actually convert that to real revenue.
So when you make these four hires,
you're gonna essentially have someone
that's focused on customer happiness.
You're gonna someone that's focused
on amplifying your message and you're gonna
have two people that are focused on converting to revenue
and as you're building out your SaaS business,
those are the four roles.
The four people that I would hire
as I'm building out my SaaS business.
Now, if you're really serious about building
out your SaaS business, you should check out my 10-point
how to start and build and scale a SaaS business guide,
a link to it below,
or you can go to tkkader.com/saas-checklist.
In that guide, I'll walk you through specific questions.
I'll stress test the strategy of your SaaS business
and help you clarify whether you're going about it
with an unstoppable strategy or not.
Lastly, if you like this video,
please be sure to smash that like button.
If you're new to the community,
be sure to hit the subscribe button and that bell icon.
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I drop a video like this,
to help you build an unstoppable strategy
for your SaaS business every Sunday
and every Wednesday.
And also if you have a friend that's a star, a founder,
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and you spread these videos that we're creating
to help SaaS founders thrive in this economy.
Lastly, remember, everyone needs a strategy
for their life and their business,
but when you are with us, yours is gonna be unstopable.
I'm TK and I will see you in the next episode.
(bright electronic music)